According to his contract with General Electric, Reagan had the right to star in at least six episodes per season. He was allowed to make his own choice of roles he felt suitable for. At first, he’d expressed delight at playing the embattled doctor under siege from Jimmy. However, when General Electric executives watched The Dark, Dark Hour on their television sets, they hated it.
“Both Abrahams and I were fired, at least temporarily,” Reagan said. “I was allowed to come back.” In a press conference, Reagan falsely claimed that he was coerced into accepting the script and the role. “That was a damn lie,” Medford claimed. “He asked to do it. The script didn’t glorify delinquents. Jimmy was clearly a punk threatening to kill an innocent man. Simmons dies. What kind of glorification was that? If anything, the teleplay showed that crime didn’t pay, and could even lead to death or imprisonment.”
Reviewers didn’t like the show. Variety claimed, “Reagan’s part is negatively enacted, and Constance Ford as his wife is called upon for illogical action as she fails to understand why her husband, though covered by a gun, doesn’t immediately attack the delinquents. This role is played by James Dean, but he has been called upon to overact.”
Some viewers found The Dark, Dark Hour evocative of the soon-to-be-released The Desperate Hours (1955), starring Humphrey Bogart and Fredric March. It, too, depicted an escaped convict breaking into a household and terrorizing a family in ways that were remarkably similar.
Stephen Vaughn later wrote how important appearances on General Electric Theater were for Reagan as a politician. “He mastered performing before microphones, cameras, and audiences, as well as how to dramatize events. He gained training in propaganda and public relations.”
Another biographer, Anne Edwards, claimed that Reagan also developed people skills while working for General Electric and making speeches around the country at various GE plants.
She noted Reagan’s appearances before employees. “The women would come running up to him with mash notes and requests for an autograph. Standing aside, the men would look at Reagan skeptically, making derogatory remarks such as ‘I bet he’s a fag.’ Then, Reagan would talk to the girls just so long before going over to the male employees. When he left, ten or fifteen minutes later, these same men would be slapping him on the back and saying, ‘That’s the way to go, Ronnie.’”
For decades, The Dark, Dark Hour languished in some dusty vault, but resurfaced in 2010. Many in the movie colony were surprised that President of the United States had appeared in a drama with the legendary James Dean, or that the script concerned a threatened assassination and its associations with John Hinckley, Jr.’s, attempt on the life of Reagan. One critic who watched it claimed, “The Dark, Dark Hour, starring James Dean and Ronald Reagan, has emerged from some archive of the Eisenhower era. For those of us who weren’t around to watch Reagan movies in the late 1930s or 40s, our former president shows he made the right choice when he switched his career from the movies to politics. He was far better suited to the political arena.”
The Desperate Hours (1955). The movie version of this Broadway hit was, indeed, successful with Jimmy’s nemesis, Humphrey Bogart, in the lead. Many viewers thought Bogart did it better than Jimmy in his interpretion of a teleplay with a roughly equivalent theme.
***
In 1962, Darwin Porter [coauthor if this biography], as a guest of novelist James Leo Herlihy, visited the movie set where an adaptation of his novel, All Fall Down, was being filmed. Its film script was by William Inge, who was suffering through a powerful crush on Warren Beatty, the movie’s lead. His co-stars included Angela Lansbury and Eva Marie Saint.
Inge had transferred his sexual attraction for Jimmy onto Beatty. He was also writing another script for Beatty, Splendor in the Grass, which would star Natalie Wood, Jimmy’s co-star in Rebel Without a Cause.
Constance Ford had only a small role in All Fall Down. Over lunch, Ford told Herlihy and Porter that Inge had claimed that if Jimmy had lived, he would be starring in both of the Beatty movies. Not only that, Inge would have preferred for Jimmy—if he had lived—to appear opposite Marilyn Monroe in Bus Stop instead of Don Murray.
She also claimed that when she had appeared with Jimmy and Reagan in The Dark, Dark Hour, “I hated my role as the doctor’s wife. I even got hate mail. I think this rather mean-spirited wife’s role prepared me to play the heartless mother of Sandra Dee in A Summer Place (1959).”
She said that by the time she and Reagan appeared together on television, “We both realized that we were not going to be bigtime movie stars like Spencer Tracy and Bette Davis. Movie roles were drying up. It was TV or oblivion. But both of us, even back then, thought Jimmy was going to become one of the biggest stars in Hollywood. He had something. If only he’d been a little taller. Of course, a midget like Alan Ladd did okay.”
“I never knew what Jimmy was going to do,” Ford said. “Once he came to rehearsal wearing only a pair of white jockey shorts. Naturally, I checked out his basket, as his dick was clearly outlined. I saw Reagan doing the same. I’m not suggesting that Reagan has a gay streak in him. But I’m told that straight men, in a shower, like to size up other men to see how they measure up.”
“Jimmy and I talked a bit, and he told me he got some real wild fan mail,” she said. “Even from old ladies who asked him to wear tighter pants in his next drama.”
“People were comparing me to Brando before I really knew who in the hell Brando was,” Jimmy told Ford. “I am neither disturbed by the comparison or flattered by it. I don’t want to be a good actor. I want to be the best actor there is. Hear that, Marlon Brando? Marlon, are you listening?”
“I liked Jimmy and flirted with him, but he didn’t make a pass at me,” she said. “Reagan had had a reputation at Warners of seducing many of the starlets, or even stars like Lana Turner before she went over to MGM. But he didn’t proposition me. Of course, by the time I met him, he had settled down with Miss Nancy, who hovered over him like a guard dog. She came onto the set looking out for her interests. Perhaps she feared Jimmy would seduce her husband, as I’m sure she’d heard all the rumors that Jimmy worked both sides of the fence.”
“I got the impression that Jimmy and that Jack Simmons guy, who played Peewee, were lovers. But I had no direct knowledge. Someone told me that Nancy was following Reagan around to protect him, and Simmons seemed to be watching over Jimmy. Alas, I left the General Electric set with my virginity intact.”
The Thief
JIMMY PLAYS AN 18TH CENTURY FRENCH ARISTOCRAT
By January of 1955, Jimmy was already a movie star, but he signed to star in two more teleplays before oblivion. In a rare stint for ABC (he usually worked for NBC or CBS), he took the role of The Thief as an episode within The United States Steel Hour. It was telecast on January 4, 1955.
Directed by Vincent J. Donehue and produced by John Haggott, The Thief was adapted for the TV screen by Arthur Arent. It was the work of the once celebrated French dramatist, Henri Bernstein, and had opened in Paris in 1906, both shocking and delighting the audiences of that day. It would later become a stage hit in both London and New York. Jimmy said “I accepted the role because it was a challenge. I was tired of playing a juvenile delinquent. Why not a nineteen-year-old French aristocrat with me dressed as a stylish fop with an elegant coiffure? A gentle and polite teenager pining over the lost love of my Marie-Louise Voyson (Diana Lynn), who had married an older man. I liked my character’s name. Monsieur Fernand Lagarde.”
In the teleplay, Lynn was married to Phillipe Voyson (Patric Knowles). Jimmy’s parents were Charles and Isabelle Lagarde (Paul Lukas and Mary Astor).
Lagarde père hires a house detective to mingle with his other guests, because 12,000 francs have been stolen from the purse in his wife’s bedroom. The detective suspects the well-mannered son. He was known to have lost money at the racetrack and was also having an affair with a Parisian actress known for her luxurious tastes. He had only a small allowance.
Jimmy as Fernand admits he’s made off with the francs to purchase expensive clothes for his former childhood sweetheart (Lynn).
“How long has this calf-love been going on with this boy?” Knowles asks.
Fernand is banished to Brazil for two years as punishment for being a wayward son.
Jimmy’s character is reduced to tears. “I learned to shed a tear on cue,” he said. “Maybe not as good as Margaret O’Brien.”
Unlike some of Jimmy’s other directors, Vincent Donehue survived Jimmy’s performance and his direction of the volatile actor. Jimmy told Donehue, “I’m leaving Hollywood and heading back to New York. I don’t need Tinseltown. Maybe they don’t need me either. But I think they really do. I’ve got the upper hand. If they want me, the fuckers are going to pay.”
Donehue was known mainly for his theater work, with only an occasional TV credit. He had helmed a Broadway play, A Trip to Bountiful (1953), starring Lillian Gish, Jo Van Fleet, and Eva Marie Saint. Jimmy was anxious to hear his impression of Van Fleet, with whom he would later co-star in East of Eden. “A strange, mysterious woman,” Donehue said. “I don’t know her at all.”
James Dean as a member of the pre-revolutionary French aristocracy in The Thief
The same year he directed Jimmy, Donehue was also helming Kim Stanley in The Traveling Lady and would, in the year after Jimmy’s death, direct Tennessee Williams’ 27 Wagons Full of Cotton (1956) with Maureen Stapleton, whom Jimmy knew.
Donehue recalled his first attempt at directing Jimmy. “We went through his opening scene, and he seemed a bit out of character. I suggested an alternative way of playing Fernand. He looked at me as if I had killed his mother, or at least murdered his father. Then I guess he wanted to shock me and the cast. He went over in front of all of us, took out his cock, and pissed all over the stage floor.”
Each of the major stars—Diana Lynn, Mary Astor, Paul Lukas, and Patric Knowles—had very different reactions to Jimmy. Astor was not impressed, and expressed her feelings about him in a memoir, A Life in Film: “She wrote: “I found out how hard it was to work with a mumbler when I did The Thief. That was before his great success. He was six feet away from me in one scene, and I could barely hear what he was saying. What I could hear seemed to have nothing to do with the script.”
“I wasn’t up on Astor movies, because I wasn’t a fan,” Jimmy said. “I’d seen her in The Maltese Falcon (1941) when I was a kid, but that was because Bogie was the star. I was told that Astor worked in silent pictures and got screwed by John Barrymore. She was involved in some big scandal back in the 1930s when the contents of her diary were exposed. She had written of her steamy affairs with playwright George Kaufman and actors like Clark Gable and Ronald Colman.”
“What people didn’t know, other than she was a whore, was that she was an alcoholic. By noon she was drunk, but she concealed it well. I’d heard she had tried to commit suicide with sleeping pills. If I had been there, I would have given her an extra bottle to finish the job.”
Lukas agreed with Astor about Jimmy’s mumbling: “I didn’t know what he was going to say, when he was going to say it, and, once said, what was it? I disliked him even more than Mary did. This son of a bitch is absolutely crazy.”
A Budapester, Lukas had won an Oscar for his performance in Watch on the Rhine (1943). To take home that Oscar, Lukas had beat out Humphrey Bogart for Casablanca and Gary Cooper for For Whom the Bell Tolls. At the age of sixteen, Lukas had made his film debut in his native city and had begun a career often cast as a villain. He’d worked with Max Reinhardt before emigrating to the United States to appear in films.
Mary Astor called Jimmy “a mumbler,” and he retaliated, claiming that she was “an alcoholic whore.”
“I was supposed to be impressed with Lukas’ credits,” Jimmy said. “I guess he was an OK actor, no great excitement that I saw. How he made it as a leading man is a mystery for the ages. He was a Jew, but I was told he could play a Jew-burning Nazi or a Gestapo agent. He shouldn’t have taken that Oscar away from Bogie, who was another son of a bitch like Lukas himself. I guess they’re all sons of bitches in Hollywood. Not the females. They’re all whores.”
An actor from the West Riding district of Yorkshire, Patric Knowles had made his film debut in 1933. Some critics compared his good looks to that of matinee idol Errol Flynn, his rumored lover. The two actors appeared in several pictures together, including The Charge of the Light Brigade in 1936, where they formed a tight bond.
They went on to make other movies, including The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). “I was often a straitlaced character stacked against Errol as the adventurer.” Knowles later defended Flynn against charges that he had been a Fascist sympathizer and a Nazi spy.
Jimmy bonded with Diana Lynn, finding her “a pert little kitten with an impish quality and a great sense of humor.” She had been a child prodigy and a celebrated pianist by the time she was twelve, later becoming a child actress, appearing in pictures such as The Major and the Minor (1942) with Ginger Rogers and in Preston Sturges’ The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek (1944). She had also starred in the 1949 My Friend Irma with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. Jimmy shared information with her about how he had inter-related with them on the set of Sailor Beware!
Lynn had also co-starred with Ronald Reagan in his much-ridiculed Bedtime for Bonzo (1951), in which both of them had babysat with a chimp who stole the picture from them.
“I flirted with Ronnie,” she told Jimmy, “but he didn’t stray my way, even though I heard he used to cheat on Jane Wyman during their ill-fated marriage. But with me, he was as clean as a hound’s tooth.”
“Diana had a dream, and that was to become another Grace Kelly,” Jimmy said. “Like so many of us, our dreams don’t come true.”
When The Thief was released, one reviewer pointed out, “A comedy of manners rarely survives its original audience and era. That’s why The Thief seems so dull, in spite of such stellar performers as that of Paul Lukas, Mary Astor, and James Dean.”
In his review, Robert Tanitch wrote: “The Thief may have been mechanical, romantic rubbish, but Dean acted the role of ‘hero and young imp’ with total sincerity within the conventions of the genre and, contrary to what Mary Astor said, he was totally articulate.”
In The Independent, Gilbert Adair claimed, “James Dean attempts to combine the boyish with the Charles Boyer-ish.”
The Unlighted Road -JIMMY’S LAST TELEPLAY
Jimmy’s career in teleplays came to an inglorious end in May of 1955 when he signed to star in The Unlighted Road for CBS’s Schlitz Playhouse of Stars. It was a thirty-minute thriller in which he was cast as Jeff Latham, a veteran of the Korean War who had been discharged from the U.S. Army.
“I don’t know why I signed on to appear in this turkey,” he later said. “I didn’t know the director (Justus Addiss); I didn’t know the producer (William Self), and I didn’t know any of my fellow actors.”
[The cast included Murvyn Vye, Edgar Stehli, Pat Hardy as the love interest, Voltaire Perkins, and Charles Wagenheim.]
Before flying to the West Coast, he had seen his close friend, Bill Gunn, a young African American actor. Gunn was with Jimmy when he was packing for his trip.
“Jimmy had this foreboding, this fear of flying,” Gunn said. “It was like he was anticipating his own death, which would come in September. He told me that planes sometimes ‘just fall out of the sky.’”
Before heading to the airport, he went to his closet and gave Dunn his one blue suit. “I have a feeling I won’t be needing this anymore.”
“But if you’re going to be in a plane crash, the undertaker will need to dress you up in this suit,” Gunn said.
“Not needed. My body will be so far gone that it won’t even make a good-looking corpse.”
“God damn it, dude,” Gunn said. “You’re one morbid kid.”
The script for the badly titled The Unlighted Road was by Walter C. Brown, with Jimmy cast in the star role
.
“At least I got to wear a leather jacket and strike my by now familiar pose with a cigarette dangling from the corner of my mouth.”
James Dean played the unwilling, unlikely (and presumably, beer-drinking) hero of The Unlighted Road
Drifting from odd job to odd job, Jimmy’s character is hired to work in a seedy diner where he meets his love interest, Pat Hardy, cast as Ann Burnett.
In The Unlighted Road, Jimmy becomes a pawn in a racketeering scheme, where he discovers that his boss and benefactor is the director of a crime syndicate dealing in stolen goods. One night, having been coerced into transporting contraband alone on an unlit road, he’s shot at by what he believes are cops racing after him in hot pursuit. Suddenly, the driver of the car that’s chasing him loses control and fatally crashes his car into a tree.
His malevolent boss soon twists this to his advantage. Emphasizing that Jimmy has been associated with a cop killing, he blackmails his hapless victim into continuing a life of crime.
As it turns out, the driver who crashed was not a policeman, but a crook who had lost control of his car because he’d been shot by other gangsters.
Jimmy was paid $2,500 for his appearance in The Unlighted Road. “Schlitz didn’t have to sell that much brew to pay my salary.”
Variety wrote that “Dean provides an interesting, offbeat personality, but underplays so much that his performance loses some of its effectiveness.”
Reviewer Robert Tantich claimed, “It was a pretty poor script. There was no suspense and no characterization, only a few good close-ups of Dean’s face. Still, such was the demand for anything with him in it that The Unlighted Road was shown no less than five times after his death.”
Alas, his role as a television star had come to an end. But within months, three of his films would be released “that will make him a star forever,” in the words of columnist Louella Parsons.
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